Shell Canada Products and ATCO EnPower have agreed to work together on the Polaris project in Alberta and the Atlas Carbon Storage Hub, through a partnership.

The Final Investment Decision (FID) for Polaris, was recently announced by the company. Polaris is a carbon capture project, which is based at the Shell Energy and Chemicals Park, in Scotford, specifically Alberta. The project is designed to capture around 650,000 tonnes of CO2 from the Shell-owned Scotford refinery and chemicals complex annually.

Alongside this FID, Shell also broke the news about another FID they have just completed, around the Atlas Carbon Storage Hub. This project is important, because the first phase of the Atlas project will create the ability to provide permanent underground storage for CO2, which has been captured by the Polaris project.

From here, the plan for Polaris and Atlas, will be to build on the success of the Quest CCS facility at Scotford. This facility has already achieved the ability to safely capture and store over nine million tonnes of CO2 since 2015. This is hugely beneficial and an excellent step forwards for the carbon capture industry, especially as, without achieving this, all of those emissions would have been released into the atmosphere.

Now that these sites have been set up, the plan of action around them involves CO2 emissions being captured by Polaris and then sent to the Atlas Hub. The emissions will reach this point by being transferred through a pipeline which is approximately 22-kilometres long and then the emissions will be transferred into storage wells. Once there, the CO2 will be stored at two kilometres underground, within the Basal Cambrian Sands, which uses the same structure as the Quest CCS facility uses. This structure was selected, as so far, the Quest CCS facility has had excellent success with storing CO2.

It has been predicted that the projects will begin operations at the end of 2028 and in order to support the development of low-carbon energy solutions, Shell has revealed plans to invest $10-$15 billion into the projects, throughout 2023-2025. This investment will support areas such as e-mobility, low-carbon fuels, renewable power generation, hydrogen and finally, carbon capture and storage.

Shell's Downstream, Renewable and Energy Solutions Director, Huibert Vigeveno, commented, "Carbon capture and storage is a key technology to achieve the Paris Agreement climate goals. The Polaris and Atlas projects are important steps in reducing emissions from our own operations."